 Optimizing content for search engines has become a fine art these days. Marketers spend countless hours developing a set of long-tail (and maybe some not-so-long tail) keyword phrases that are deemed vital to the success of their Web sites and their rank in the search engine results pages (SERPs). But even the best written content needs extra help to stay at the top.
Even once you have optimized your content, your site has started to brim with quality, relevant inbound links to key pages and it’s beginning to rank higher in the SERPs, it is a constant challenge to maintain good search engine rankings.
Fortunately, there are two oft-forgotten search engine optimization (SEO) techniques pertaining to links that can help you sustain the momentum:
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Link Juice: A term originally coined by Greg Boser of Web Guerrila, it is the concept of the level of credibility or “weight” that a page is perceived to contain. This page weight can in turn be shared with other pages it links to either internally or externally.
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Nofollow Attribute: using the attribute rel=”nofollow” in a link tells the search engine robots to “not follow” the link, or more specifically, follow but do not associate the page linking with the destination page.
How to sweeten your SEO with Link Juice
First, let’s discuss the benefits of Link Juice. This may be review for some people (and may be a point to argue for others). As pages gain inbound links and are indexed by search engine spiders, they gain credibility or weight, referred to by many in the SEO world as “Link Juice”. In other words, the more backlinks from 3rd party high-quality pages directed to a particular page on your Web site, the higher the perceived relevance and credibility of that page and your site. Higher relevance and credibility ultimately result in higher rankings in the SERPs.
The concept of “Link Juice” is generally accepted by the SEO community but there are still some camps that treat it as bunk (maybe the same people who scoff at the idea of Google's Sandbox?). Some also refer to it as Pass-through-Ratio or Link-Votes but neither of these terms are nearly as cool as the Juice. Link Juice should also not be confused with Google's PageRank which, although possibly a reliable read on potential Link Juice for a given page, is not directly related to the pass-through-ratio and of course remains Google-centric in nature.
You can think of Link Juice in a semi-literal sense just as it sounds: Any page can contain a level of Link Juice (Link-Votes, Pass-through etc.) gathered from numerous sources. As the search engines deem your content of higher relevance for a keyword phrase and/or of higher authority on your topics, the more Link Juice the page is perceived to be “filled” with.
The more Link Juice a page contains, the higher the quality and relevance of that particular page and its content in the eyes of the search engines. When one page links to another page, it provides some of its Link Juice to the recipient page, in theory reducing the amount of “Juice” that the giving page has to provide. Therefore, not only is it good to know who is linking to your site, it is also important to control where your own links are going and know specifically with whom you are sharing your Link Juice.
In my next post, I will discuss how you can have complete control over which links on your site are actually followed by the search engine spiders, hence sharing Link Juice, using the Nofollow Attribute.
About The Author
Jeff Jones is a Web-optimization specialist at Lyris, Inc. He helps companies improve their Web sites, SEO results and PPC-campaign performance.
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There are actually a few reasons for using "no follow" for internal link "sculpting" rather than a javascript call:
1. Robots can't read javascript so depending on how you are using the script the link might get followed by the bot anyway.
2. Using no follow attributes to internal links usually mean that you still want those pages indexed - if you hide the link completely behind a script then the bot won't index or follow it.
That said, in the matter of external linking - I completely agree that giving credit (and sharing PageRank) where credit is due but there are definitely times to use a "no follow" to external pages (especially for blog or article comment sections which are notorious targets for spam links).